by Bella James
Once she did, the idea of failure was one she either didn't believe – or refused to contemplate.
And now, the speculation was brief and brutal, simple in the extreme. If the rebellion failed, Olivia Bane would die. At the hands of her fiancé or during a battle, defending her family or leading troops, the figurehead known as the Chosen One.
It made no difference. This existence would be snuffed out and with it, everyone she loved would perish.
Failure was not an option.
Livy blinked, and started listening to the war council around her again.
"Maybe they do know where I am," the Plutarch said loudly, jabbing his finger at his advisors with every word. "But they will face an armed and ready city and have a fight on their hands with Arcadia."
Livy breathed steadily. During the night Arash had told her the attack on the city would come, but the intent was to hold the city in a state of siege, making the city leaders believe they were holding ground against the rebels when really the rebel forces wanted nothing more than to ensure Arcadia, its military and its leaders, had no time for anything but defense. There would be no attempt to take the city. Let the Arcadians, the Aristocracy and the military believe they were holding out
The real target was the Plutarch, and Livy was leading him deep into the rural provinces, to her home in Pastoreum.
Livy knew Arash was a rebel plant. She knew Selene was loyal to Livy and not to the Centurion ranks or the Plutarch's rule.
From there she could guess some of the other high ranking military and Centurion guards and maybe even advisors on this bus were also rebels.
In the night, between kisses, she'd asked Arash if it were possible Arcadian spies had infiltrated rebel holdings.
He'd told her anything was possible, but it seemed unlikely Arcadian Aristocracy could pull it off – they valued their comforts too highly.
"Military could," she'd mused. The Plutarch's army was brave and brutal and thorough, trained to withstand pain. The soldiers could more than handle desert training. Their fierce loyalty to the Plutarch could easily translate into fervent rebel leanings.
Livy shook herself from the memory and looked around the bus again. Her sister still slept beside the window. The duenna sat now at the back of the bus. Selene had barked at her that to assume Livy's honor was in danger on the bus was to assume Livy's behavior was as lascivious as the behavior the duenna was tasked with preventing. Unless you want to answer to the ruler why you disrespect his bride-to-be, old woman, I'd stand down, she'd threatened and the threat had worked.
Earnestine Balk looked deflated.
General Kent and his closest aides paced the front of the bus, in consultation with John Malvin. The cabinet argued and pontificated, the same as they would in any meeting, as if the city behind them wasn't burning.
Seriously, she thought at Arash, wishing he could hear her. If all we had to deal with for the rebellion was this lot, things would be so much simpler. Their own sense of importance would keep them from noticing if the rebels actually walked into the Plutarch's palace and took over. They'd still be debating the best way to defeat the rebellion.
The decision had been made. The Plutarch and bride would be taken to safety in the countryside. He retained power. He would never relinquish it. His elite cabinet traveled with him. In his stead in Arcadia was a shadow cabinet that could govern and make decisions. They were not out of contact, so long as the rebels didn't take down the communications array.
Livy knew they had no intention of doing that.
Then the wedding would be where they made their stand. They were heading fast for Pastoreum, Julia's broadcasts showing the busses all over the map, anywhere but where they actually were. The plan had been to confuse the rebel forces with myriad busses in myriad lands. Being chased from the gates of the city meant their true location was known.
And their true mission. To reach a rural province where the Plutarch, in an attempt to unite the rebel-held lands and the commonwealth lands and the governing city of Arcadia, would marry his Chosen One, the ceremony mending bridges and establishing a new understanding.
Livy would have rolled her eyes at the overkill of rhetoric if the city wasn't actually under attack. Her grandfather had taught her about double speak and political maneuvering, about the sort of public relations image projected by power that wanted to remain in power without engaging in hand-to-hand struggles that might prove dangerous for the ultimately fearful politicians.
They would always send other people to die in their stead. Which was why Livy wanted to get to Pastoreum where more rebels waited. Either she would marry the Plutarch and see if the bloodshed stilled, or she would lead the rebellion at Arash's side.
Or she and her family would die.
That terror hadn't left her.
She understood, again, that she had changed since she'd been taken from her home. She feared her own death – she was only 16, she wanted to have so many more years – but she feared far more being the death of the people she loved.
If she could keep them from harm, she'd gladly go to her own death.
The first ornithopter roared out of the sky then. Livy ducked instinctively, then immediately leaned to the side to see up through the bus window. On the side of the craft, painted boldly, was the silhouette of a butterfly, with a piece missing from the bottom of its left wing.
Livy's hand went instinctively to her shoulder, covering her birthmark even as she went on watching the battle being met in the sky.
Above them, the military choppers escorting the bus whirled into action, screaming straight at the rebel choppers. The ships of both sides bristled with weaponry from long distance missiles to big guns for up close fighting.
She reached for Arash without thinking. It was Selene who was there, holding onto Livy, tugging her fast to the back of the bus, past Earnestine Balk who was trying to force open the doors.
The Plutarch, under guard, was being hustled out a side exit. At each exit, the minute the panic button was hit and the doors sprang open, reinforced metal awnings tunneled down over them, like armadillo shells opening up and surrounding them, guiding them under cover to a distance away from the bus.
"This way," Selene said tightly.
Livy instantly dug her heels in. "Pippa!"
"Got her," Arash said harshly from just behind her. "Move, Livy! Move, move, move, move, move!"
They ran to the hovering choppers, now only three feet above the ground, the fast beating blades kicking up dust around them, creating a mini-storm. Livy covered her eyes, ran to the machine and threw herself upward to the hands that reached for her.
She had no idea if she was boarding a military or rebel ship.
The difference would mean pretense or passion. Military, and she would continue with the Plutarch, maybe even wed in hopes of stabilizing the country in the moments before the revolution.
Rebel, and the rebellion would start then.
Fate had taken the choice out of her hands. It was move or die.
She threw herself aboard, allowed male hands to guide her fast away from the door so they could reach for Pippa, for Selene and Arash. The instant Arash's heels cleared the threshold the soldiers were barking commands. The ship accelerated up fast, dizzying as it rocked and circled, streaking upwards, and the whole of Arcadia began to appear beneath them, the plastiglass bottom of the ship allowing a clear view of the other ornithopters, the buses, the escape in progress.
Of the rebel ship streaking their way. Livy turned fast to Arash, the question in his eyes.
He shook his head, minute movement. Mouthed, They know where we are.
The rebel ship banked and hung, seemingly unmoving, waiting until the instant the chopper with the Plutarch gained altitude.
Livy frowned. The rebels weren't firing.
And then they did. Small missiles fired from the front of the rebel ship. The chopper Livy was in just barely had enough altitude to escape the blast and the shrapnel as the first bus blew apart.<
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Black clouds of smoke roiled up into the clear, blue Arcadian sky as the military ship turned and sped toward Pastoreum.
SHE HAD enough time to sort things out in her head without resorting to overt communications with the soldier assigned to protect her. Both Arash and Selene stood tall and proud, watching, alert.
Livy huddled in her seat, her arms around her trembling sister. Neither of them had been in an ornithopter before, neither had ever flown in anything before.
She hated and loved it. Her stomach swooped, rose and fell with the same movements from the craft. Her fingers white knuckled on Pippa's arms, and Pip did the same to her. Terror stronger than that of the battle gripped Livy at the speed and heights.
But the wonder was there, too. Seeing the green of the Arcadian countryside give way to the dun brown unbroken sea of Forbidden Zone and the deserts spreading beneath them and in less time than she could imagine, the green of Pastoreum lay before them.
"Home," Pip whispered.
Livy just held her. The future, she thought, in place of home.
Whatever that future might be.
CHAPTER 10
T hey landed in Pastoreum the same day, setting down in familiar grassy fields beside comforting cottonwood groves. A small stream trickled nearby and flowers grew in profusion. Livy still loved the land, but this wasn't home anymore.
Still, it was good to be so close to her family. She could be with them inside hours. By bus they'd have been on the road for days. Not possible, not being chased by rebels, and probably not possible because the rebels didn't want to kill the Plutarch, only to make it look as if they were. Too many days on the road and it would be obvious that either the rebels weren't going for the kill, or the rebels were a pack of idiots.
The first was true; the second wasn't. The rebels were holding back for something and Livy thought it was probably the same reason the Plutarch had of waiting before launching the counteroffensive that would take down all the rebels in all the bases they knew of: the wedding. Both sides were using it to establish their power and bring sentiment to their side. The Plutarch because he was marrying a commoner to cement relations between the countries, between rural citizens and Arcadian elite. The rebels because the Plutarch was commandeering one of their own and starting a systematic genocide of rebels and anyone who sympathized with them, all of which they assumed would bring citizens to their side.
It made her nervous. As much as she feared the conflict to come, she wanted it to start.
Once it started, it could end.
She balled her hands into fists and waited.
When they landed, she went directly to the Plutarch, putting her arms around him in a way that startled his guard into attention and startled John Malvin as well. He hesitated, then returned her embrace.
"Are you all right, little one?"
For once his voice sounded like he cared.
She swallowed down the hope. He'd hurt her so many times she'd lost count. Now she only nodded, and said, "I've been so scared." She let for you be interpreted by any listeners.
It wasn't a lie. She was scared. She was even scared for the Plutarch. Far from lying only on her shoulders, the rebellion depended on the Plutarch living through it, the dictator and figurehead of the Aristocratic government. If John Malvin died before the revolution could take hold, the power would transfer to another in his cabinet. There would be announcements throughout the land, but getting hold of the new seat of power once the rebels had tipped their hand? Impossible. And life would go on, with countless numbers of people living and dying for nothing more than supporting the one percent of aristocratic leaders who ruled the government and the lands with an iron fist.
The instant she broke free of the Plutarch Livy saw the wounded pilot of one of the military crafts that had been shot down. Another chopper had picked him up, his crew dead, but the pilot survived. He was trying to look stoic but pain was evident on his face and he held his hands out in front of him like he wanted to separate himself from them.
They'd been badly burned in the crash.
Livy instantly broke away from the group and went to him. Selene and Arash both started to reach for her, then pulled the others back. One of the Plutarch's guards did briefly hold her upper arm, but released it when his ruler snapped at him to let her go.
Livy looked from her arm to the guard, gave him a long look, and stalked to the burned pilot. She examined his hands, said, "Wait," and ran without waiting into the nearby fields, hearing the commotion of startled guards behind her. That made her give herself a small, tight smile.
She found the small cow's spittle daisy easily enough, and gathered water from the stream in her hands, drenching the flower and carrying it back.
The pilot sat on the edge of the road on a large rock. His elbows on his knees, he held his hands upturned in front of him, still trying to divorce himself from them.
Livy sank to her knees in front of him, eliciting a hiss from someone with more propriety behind her. Probably Balk. She'd be the sort to worry about how things looked even in the midst of an apocalypse.
The first application of the sticky clear sap made the pilot gasp. The second made him go boneless in relaxation as the pain flowed out of his wounded hands.
"Keep the flower," Livy told him, tucking it inside the kit he carried on his belt. "Wet it and spread on the sap when they start hurting again."
His dark eyes met hers. He seemed awed.
"The sap will keep your hands from hardening up, keep them supple. Keeping the pain in check will help you heal faster."
He was still staring at her, now looking confused, so Livy asked, "What?"
Helplessly, the soldier said, "I'm not – I mean, I'm just – I'm not anybody."
Livy tilted her head to look up into his face and make him meet her eyes. "You're not just anything. You matter."
She stood. "Everyone matters."
That's when the Plutarch's guard pulled her away, back into one of the ornithopters, this time with the Plutarch and the cabinet and, it seemed, her wedding dress.
They were in route to Agara in minutes.
LIVY DREAMED.
She fell asleep in the chopper, exhausted by the day.
In the dream, she ran through a raging battle, toward her family where they stood, hideously at risk. Her grandfather was there, alive, and Livy panicked, wanting to get to him, but no matter how hard she ran, she couldn't get there fast enough and the soldier's gun fired, the sound too loud, too shattering, and her grandfather fell even as Livy changed direction, racing for her mother who stood with the toddler in her arms, her face rapt in horror as she held the faceless child in her arms.
No. It was different. It was worse. In the dream, she stood on a battlefield while all around her the battle still raged. Explosions lit the day brighter than the sunlight, and the screaming of the serfs and villages and Aristocracy and soldiers and Centurions came through to her, an outraged chorus of pain and loss.
She began to move, trying to make her way to some destination. She thought she wanted to get to her parents' house but she was still heading in the direction of the home where she'd grown up, not the new stone house they lived in since she'd been chosen.
"It's not chosen for what you think," Livy said aloud as she moved. There was no one close to enough to hear her.
And then there was.
They reached out to her from all sides, villagers, the people she'd grown up with, betas from Arcadia, the people who made things happen and kept things moving, Gammas, those sentenced to work in the pleasure palace brothels, the untouchables, those destined to be exiled to the border villages just outside the Forbidden Zone.
And rebels.
They held their hands out to her, reached for her, tried to touch her, as if she were the thing that could save them from the missiles that fell, the fires that raged, the soldiers that murdered and the Plutarch who ruled them.
They offered her flowers, as if that could cure t
he fevers raging. Livy held the white daisies and felt despair. All such rural cures had been tried and the fever still raged.
They offered her fangs, hard white teeth pulled from giant serpents, traditional tests of courage that had once meant something.
Their meaning was lost to time.
Livy held the serpent fang in both hands. Around it, where it touched her as she cupped it, her skin felt cool. Cold, even. Chilled.
Something stirred in her mind. She looked up at the nearest serf, her father, to her surprise, carrying Tad whose head flopped limply. He looked dead already.
Livy screamed and jolted forward toward the child in her father's arms –
--and jolted herself awake.
The ornithopters touched down in Agara.
CLIMBING out of the airships into her hometown was disorienting. For Pippa, it had only been a matter of weeks since she'd been grabbed by the Centurion and taken to the pleasure palaces. Traumatic, but maybe not long enough for her entire life to have changed.
For Livy, she'd been taken by the Plutarch's tax, held by Centurions, educated at the Institute, fallen in love with and been separated from Simon who had taught her to fight, kidnapped by rebels, instructed in all the arts of war, ridden a scorpion and killed a sand snake.
And she was about to marry the Plutarch in a bid either for peace or for war.
None of which changed the way Pippa trembled against her side and clung to Livy.
But Pip, at least, had breathed the word home again.
HER FAMILY WASN'T there to meet them.
That had been prearranged, of course. The minute Arcadia came under attack and the Plutarch's plans changed, it was assumed that no one would notice the choppers overhead and they could fly quietly into Agara.
Right, Livy had said dryly, and seen the sentiment echoed by Arash and Selene.
So the guard would escort her to the new family home, the one they'd still occupy since the Plutarch was still marrying their daughter.
The minute Pip had been released from the brothels and in Livy's care, her parents had been notified by the communications underground the rebels had, and a little more slowly, by the Centurion. Now they'd get to see both their daughters again.